Week Thirty Nine – Getting Plastered

Preparatory work for the garage continued this week with serious shoring up of the existing retaining wall.

Tempted to say belt and braces, but it's a serious matter and no sense taking risks.

Underpinning the wall certainly looks scary. The ground level the other side of that wall is a couple of metres above the bottom of the existing concrete foundation, such as it is. And we're digging out another couple of metres below the wall.

The concrete uderpin will have steel reinforcing bars embedded in it and linked into the horizontal concrete slab which will be poured in front of the wall. We're doing two things - underpinning the existing wall and then putting in further slabs of reinforced concrete to make the wall a retaining wall.

Steel reinforcing bars ready to go in.

Meanwhile, work prceeds inside the barn. Main bedroom plasterboarded.

And plastered over. That's the way they do it in this country nowadays. Nail up sheets of plasterboard and then skim over it with a 5mm layer of plaster to provide a continuous finish over the joints. Presumably quicker and cheaper than just plastering. In France they have a Placo system which involves metal studwork and plasterboards with a slightly recessed edge. That way you only have to tape and skim over the joints and then can paint over the whole thing. No doubt the industry in this country would be a bit sniffy about that method, and could give you a list as long as your arm as to why it doesn't work. But there you go.

The north passage. We're going to need to build another retaining wall here too.

Pouring concrete into the holes under the wall. The question was, how do you get the dumper close enough to the hole, given all the shoring acrows and timbers in the way? The solution was to stand off a bit and slide the wet concrete down a couple of boards. Cool huh?

Oh deer - again.

One day the back garden will be a beautifully manicured lawn. But for now ...

Issues we've been struggling with this week have included: keeping plasterers on site (they keep being pulled off on to other jobs), what kind of floor screed for the underfloor heating, when to order the underfloor heating kit, and floor finishes (tiles, wood or natural stone). Last but not least there's still the question of water quality. Various tests of the stuff coming out of the borhole are giving conflicting and confusing results. So what do we do? Put in all the filtration and purification stuff the worst case scenario calls for, or what?
Sometimes I think it would be so much easier just to hand over a pot of money to a developer and say give me a call when it's ready.

And finally